1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to methods and systems for use in computer software having databases. In PARTICULAR, the invention provides methods, apparatuses and systems for more effectively and efficiently loading text data into a database.
2. Prior Art
Those skilled in the art will appreciate that software programs are executed on computer systems, where a computer system includes at least a processor and memory. Further, most software programs use a database as a repository for storing data. Examples of such databases include Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase, to name a few. The data is stored in relational database tables in a pre-defined schema. The data can be created in the database using GUIs, such as for example Oracle Forms, by manual entry or, most often, by the user loading the data in the database using a software program, such as Loader.
An external storage unit, such as a disk file or a tape that contains the data to be loaded (“dataset”) is usually encoded in binary or text (ASCII) format. If a software loading program is being used to load the dataset, the loading program reads the dataset, decodes the encoding and loads it in the database tables. This is a very common scenario for software used, for, example, in the oil and gas industry where the need is for data to be loaded in various industry standard formats, such as DLIS, Geoshare, WITSML, to name a few. These standard formats are in binary, XML or ASCII. Therefore, for such industry data in standard formats, “custom” loaders are written to load the data. The custom loaders read a specific format and load (create/update) data in a specific repository. For example, GeoFrame DLIS Loader reads DLIS data and loads data in GeoFrame repository only.
However, there is large amount of data in text files for which no standard exists. The non-standard text files may contain data in any format and it is almost impossible to create custom loaders for all such text data layouts.